There is a moment in any fashion house when the temperature shifts and the mood quietly recalibrates. At famously hard-to-pronounce Loewe, that moment came with the arrival of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez as creative directors last year. The duo behind New York brand Proenza Schouler made their spring 2026 debut at the Spanish house with a quieter, more considered take on modernity.
Where Jonathan Anderson, who led Loewe from 2013 until his departure in March 2025, delighted in surrealist provocation – balloon shoes, grass dresses and trompe l’oeil oddities – McCollough and Hernandez are taking a different approach, one less interested in spectacle.
In the two seasons since they arrived, they have brought with them an American vocabulary rooted in sportswear, now elevated into tailored bombers, generous denim and pieces designed to suggest movement, giving athleisure a more refined, lived-in ease across the spring/summer and autumn/winter collections.
Their palette is central to this new story. Citrus and butter yellows, sanguine reds, and flashes of orange, purple and blue speak to a brighter optimism, feeling like an intentional move away from the cerebral cool of Anderson’s tenure.
At a leather house, surface matters. Here, the pair coax leather into unexpected forms – pressed and crumpled to resemble cotton, or shredded into featherweight T-shirts – while shearling is shaved into dresses or folded into coats that frame the face. Knitted tops and dresses trail loose threads, while a cocoon coat becomes a tangle of intricately knotted plastic strands. Elsewhere, plastic appears in floral daywear tops, and high-shine leather is moulded into sharply waisted coats.
The designers are not afraid to lean into Loewe’s Spanish heritage, either – reworking flamenco ruffles across minidresses and, most notably, into the undulating neck of the new Flamenco bag.
Their debut collection continued the house’s long-standing dialogue with art, taking as its starting point a painting by American artist Ellsworth Kelly, an abstract work in primary yellow and red that helped establish the collection’s tone.
Beloved house motifs have been subtly reworked, too. The Anagram bag now nods to the codes of the 1970s, while the Amazona bag has been revisited to mark an anniversary year in 2026.
Perhaps most significantly, the logo has been redrawn in a typeface unearthed from the museum archive. Add to that the introduction of humo grey – Spanish for smoke – and McCollough and Hernandez’s language begins to take shape: one that mixes precision and technical mastery with an innate, almost streetwise wearability.
Positioned as an “antidote to spectacle”, the collections feel like a discreet redirection of Loewe’s recent past, bringing a new approachability to the house’s studied intellectualism.
For a duo so fresh to the role, their impact already feels pronounced. As Loewe marks its 180th anniversary, the deeply loved Spanish house appears energised, refracted through a lens of street-smart Americana. It makes for a compelling – and quietly joyful – proposition.
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